“Yes,” I agreed. “But it’s what they don’t say that’s always the most interesting!”

Maybe I watched too much Kung-Fu as a kid, but, grasshopper, bare with me and I’ll tell you why the GDC keynotes are a don’t-miss event.

Phil Harison presides over Sony Computer Entertainment’s Worldwide Studios. This towering Brit also fills the role as the primary mouthpiece for the company in the US when it comes to talking to game developers.

So, it was very strange, and unprecedented in my experience, that this keynote, given before a room nominally filled, or at least heavily populated, with game developers, was delivered almost without talking about either games or game development.

What Harison did talk about was a vision of “Game 3.0″, Sony’s clever way of stating that things like You Tube, My Space and the Wikipedia might actually be more than a fad and possibly a SingStar, showing features that made this solid karaoke title into something approaching a full-fledged karaoke lifestyle.

But he saved his real emphasis, and most of his hour-long presentation, for a new PS3 service called Home and game-like title called LittleBigPlanet.

Home is Sony’s glorious high-fidelity virtual world you will access through your Sony game machine. While it wasn’t clear what you’d actually do in the space other than dress like an extra on Sex in the City, stare at trophies you’ve won in various games, shoot pool, watch movie trailers and push furniture around, it actually looked like something different. And by different, I mean it didn’t look like a game, just a cool virtual world along the lines Second Life, just much less cluttered (and doubtlessly with fewer S&M clubs)

LittleBigPlanet wowed the crowd with a physics system filled with cool parts and populated by characters so cute and cuddly you wonder if Sony actually stole them from Nintendo. To demonstrate the world-building tool, the title’s designers when on a four player adventure that, while it worked more or less like the classic Super Mario Bros, if you paid attention,was just an interactive playground populated by some novel kinetic puzzles.

And even though this was the first title Sony has shown since it launched the PlayStation 3 that actually might make someone want to buy a PS3, it really wasn’t a game in the traditional sense. Whatever game-like qualities it had, LittleBigPlanet was cool mainly because it was different.

What to make of this?

I think, to paraphrase the game designers and deep thinker Ernest Adams, “The first-person shooter is a solved problem.” And by that I mean that Sony seems to get that there are enough people making games about driving cars, shooting guns and riding dragons. We need more games, it was suggested in my mind by this presentation, like the ones Nintendo has been making.

And as much as it probably pains Sony to have to look at Nintendo doing so well outside the box, it’s nice to know that Sony has been running around outside too. Their emphasis on playing over gaming bodes very well for people looking to have fun.

Which brings me to the keynote yesterday.

A pulsing throng of fans sat rapt as Shigeru Miyamoto, the father of Mario, as he basically said (and I’m really boiling down his hour long speech and pretty much telling you what I think he meant):

“Uh, what can I say. We said we wanted to make fun games. We said that it wasn’t about graphics. So, now that everyone thinks that we are so smart because we are selling Wiis as fast as we can make them, what do you want from me? Go make some interesting games. I know wegood model for the game’s business. He briefly mentioned some new PS3 tools, which I can only assume anyone who would care probably already knew about them and he spent a little time on will.”

But of course, that’s not what he said. That’s what you could hear if you listened for what wasn’t thereâ€”the message behind all the hype.

Which brings me to the third keynote. The one Microsoft didn’t deliver. They didn’t deliver it because there wasn’t a third keynote and there never is at GDC.

The silence of Microsoft allowed you to hear the whoops and hollers of the Gears of War team as they took home the Game Developers Choice Award for game of the year.